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Cabral followed a more westerly course than had Vasco da Gama, and,
carried by wind and tide, his fleet landed on the coast of South America in
what is today Brazil on April 22, 1500. Cabral named his discovery Terra da
Vera Cruz (“Land of the True Cross”) and claimed it for Portugal.
King João III of Portugal sent the first settlers to Brazil in 1531. Three years
later, he divided the coast into 15 sections, placing them under the private
ownership of friends of the crown.
The colonists soon discovered that the land and climate were ideal for
growing sugarcane. Plantations required plentiful labor, though. Portuguese
plantation owners tried a number of methods to force the indigenous people to
work in the sugar fields, but none worked well. So the colony resorted to
slavery.
Bandeirantes
, men from São Paulo usually born of Indian mothers and
Portuguese fathers, hunted the Indians into the interior. By the mid-1600s, they
had pursued their prey all the way to the peaks of the Peruvian Andes.
A Legacy of Inequality 19
This section of a 1502 map
of the world shows the
coastline of Brazil, which
had been “discovered” by
the Portuguese navigator
Pedro Álvares Cabral two
years earlier. The Brazil
area was already inhabited
by millions of Native
Americans when the first
Portuguese settlers arrived.